Now:
Moving Visions
Robbie Cornelissen
drawings, animations
22 March – 27 April 2025
In autumn 2024, Robbie Cornelissen (1954) spent three months in Dale i Sunnfjord, Norway, a residency surrounded by mountains, waterfalls and fjords next to the open sea. The abundant nature, landscapes and silence were influential as was the studio with its high ceiling and daylight streaming in through large windows. Given the height of the room, Robbie Cornelissen created long, vertical drawings, starting from a smaller sheet in the centre that was gradually expanded. The centre of the vertical work recalls the trunk of a dead tree with vertical branches in between which organic structures appear. At the very top, they culminate in circular shapes that crown and complete the drawing.
Some years ago already Robbie Cornelissen’s focus shifted from architectural spaces with a gravitating central perspective into more undefined spaces where there is rather a movement from inside to the outside. These derive from his studies of clouds where not the line but the volume is decisive and the pencil is replaced by graphite powder. An early work from this Cloud series is based on a photo of the mushroom-shaped cloud resulting from the hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini Atoll.
Later natural clouds like the one from the volcanic eruption at Surtsey in Iceland followed, awe inspiring because of their beauty and destructive power.
The confined architectural interior thus gives way to the open spaced of landscape and nature. In the animation Terra Nova, architectural structures like buildings are swallowed up by a black cloud, the view subsequently breaks free from earth and enters the infinite space of the universe. Cornelissen thereby also refers to the ecological crisis our planet is currently facing, which as it were, which is overcome by an escape into space in search of a new habitat.
The exhibition Moving Visions presents an overview of the development from linear architectural spaces to the voluminous cloud structures to the organic and landscape-like elements of the most recent drawings from the residency in Norway. The animation Terra Nova, following its premiere at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 2021, can now be seen for the first time in the Netherlands.
